By Mark Gutglueck
More than a decade ago, Mary Ashley made a name for herself as a hard-charging deputy prosecutor devoted to obtaining convictions against those engaged in the sexual exploitation of children. Four years ago, her reputation in that regard was used as the ostensible grounds for promoting her to the second highest ranking position in the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, that of assistant district attorney. Now, with the ever-deepening scandal over the sexual abuse and molestation of students by teachers in the Redlands Unified School District intensifying, Ashley is on the brink of being fired as details emerge about her efforts to prevent detectives with the Redlands Police Department from advancing with their investigation into reports relating to crimes that have to date resulted in the district paying settlements of $30.7 million to the victims.
Pointedly, Ashley’s motive in the cover-up appears to have roots in an equally lurid sex scandal in which she, the district attorney and the district attorney’s wife are entangled.
Like a good number of young attorneys, Ashley sought and obtained work as a prosecutor to beef up her résumé shortly after she passed the bar. In her case, she was hired by San Bernardino County’s then-district attorney, Dennis Stout in 1998. Initially, she was given the routine, menial assignments given to virtually all newcomers in the office, the less-than glamorous role of filing low- and middle-grade misdemeanor cases, evaluating police reports to determine whether enough evidence existed for the office to proceed with what most prosecutors and much of the public consider to be trifling matters. A year later she was given a reprieve from the drear of that station when she was allowed to move on to felony work. Initially she was entrusted mainly with theft cases, primarily involving auto theft, matters about which she feigned some enthusiasm, but for which she felt no real passion. With the new millennium, however, she was given a handful of child molest and child abuse assignments. It was within this province of the law that Ashley seemed to have found her calling.
In 2002, Mike Ramos, a deputy prosecutor under Dennis Stout who had been employed by Stout and then-Assistant District Attorney Dan Lough to prosecute, among other things, political corruption and malfeasance in office cases against Hispanic elected and appointed government officials, challenged Stout and beat him in that year’s election.
Ramos continued to employ Ashley, who was then working out of the Victorville prosecutor’s office, in the same capacity she had acceded to under Stout. In 2004, with the formulation of the Victorville Family Violence Unit, a pilot program intended to test the efficacy of concentrating investigative and prosecutorial resources with regard to a specified subset of generally related cases including the physical abuse of minors, women and seniors, fraud targeting the elderly and sexual exploitation and abuse, Ashley was designated as its lead prosecutor. In little more than six years as an attorney, her career was advancing nicely.
Along the way, Ashley had developed a relationship with another up-and-coming member of the district attorney’s office, Alex Martinez. In time, they married.
To be certain, there are aspects of the prosecution of sex-related crimes and in particular crimes relating to the sexual-predation of children that carry with them significant and complicated application-of-justice implications. The mere leveling of such accusations – accurate or not – have a profoundly and often irreversible negative impact upon the accused. The nature of the charges will render virtually all elements of the public biased against the defendant, making mounting a defense – even a legitimate one – extremely difficult. Moreover, the sordid facts, minutiae and evidence presented in the making of such cases are extremely abhorrent. Even if the veracity of the charges can be successfully brought into question or refuted, the association with the allegations can destroy a defendant’s reputation forever.
Faced with that reality, most defendants will plead guilty short of trial, particularly if the prosecution offers a sentencing recommendation, which in the overwhelming number of cases are ratified by the court, that is substantially less than the decade-or-more sentences that the conviction on such crimes often result in. Indeed, even an innocent defendant under the duress of facing such charges and at the advice of competent legal counsel, will enter a guilty plea.
Questions attended Ashley’s comportment within this milieu. While her skill as a trial lawyer was not her strong suit, the sheer ferocity with which she handled each case and the air of moral rectitude which she convincingly assumed conveyed that there was no question that those she was prosecuting were absolutely guilty of the most despicable acts imaginable. The indigent she prosecuted whose defense was handled by the county’s poorly funded and inadequately staffed public defenders were helpless before her onslaught. In the cases where she was up against a better financially-fixed defendant, by her display of moral outrage over the circumstances of the alleged crimes she succeeded again and again at convincing the judges before whom the matters were being tried to foreclose whatever legal gambits of escape that were being utilized by those defendants to elude what she insisted was those defendants’ just retribution.
In one precedent setting instance, Ashley succeeded in expanding the ability of prosecutors to push a case of sexual assault toward ultimate conviction. Of significance, in that particular case the victim was connected to a crucial element of the legal defense network in San Bernardino County that might have otherwise been opposed to the expansion of the prosecutorial reach of the law she employed.
Robert Lee Cadogan, who was then 43, stealthily gained entry, early in the morning of Christmas Eve 2004, into the home of a deputy public defender. Once inside he crept into one of the home’s bedrooms where the homeowner’s 20-year-old niece, visiting for the holidays, was sleeping. He forcibly raped her, threatening to kill her if she awoke anyone. Afterward, Cadogan was quickly apprehended. In February 2005, his defense attorney stymied the legal proceedings against him with a claim of his client’s mental incompetence, which was confirmed the following month when the court received a psychologist’s finding that Cadogan was not competent to stand trial. In May 2005, Ashley made a motion with the court that a so-called “conditional examination” of Cadogan’s wife, Paris Cadogan, take place on the grounds that she was terminally ill with cancer and likely would not survive until trial. Cadogan’s attorney opposed the motion, arguing the criminal proceedings had been suspended and the conditional examination should not go forward. The court ordered the conditional examination to proceed, and that examination of Mrs. Cadogan took place on May 16, 2005. Under questioning, Paris Cadogan provided testimony deemed probative of her husband’s guilt, including her description of him fleeing from her home when the police arrived to question him, together with sexual characteristics of Robert Lee Cadogan matching testimony by the victim. She stated that her husband had vitiligo, a skin condition which resulted in white patches on his hands and genitals, which matched the victim’s description. The following month, June 2005, Paris Cadogan died. The hearing into Cadogan’s competence to stand trial continued from that point forward and the court thereafter granted Ashley’s motion to compel Cadogan to submit to a psychological examination, overcoming his refusal to submit to follow-up mental condition testing after the March 2005 finding of incompetence. A competency trial for Cadogan was initiated in April 2006, ending with a jury’s conclusion in May 2006 that he was indeed competent to stand trial, and the court reinstated criminal proceedings against him. In July 2007, a second jury was impaneled and the defendant’s trial on his alleged crimes began. Cadogan’s attorney sought to have the case dismissed based on the court having allowed the conditional examination despite the case having been suspended. The court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss and permitted the prosecution to play the videotape of Paris Cadogan’s conditional examination for the jury. The jury subsequently convicted Cadogan of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, attempted sodomy by use of force and first degree residential burglary. Cadogan was sentenced to 37-years-to-life in prison. His attorney, Marsha Clark, appealed the conviction to the Fourth District California Court of Appeal, Division 3, contending the court erred by admitting at trial evidence obtained at a conditional examination of his late wife because Cadogan’s competency was in question at the time of the conditional examination. The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction, with its only modification that it substituted a one-year consecutive term rather than a four-year consecutive term for his attempted sodomy conviction, reducing Cadogan’s total prison term commitment from 37-years-to-life to 34-years-to-life.
The upshot of the ruling on appeal was that in the future prosecutors would be at liberty to utilize conditional examinations in obtaining convictions. Ashley was lionized as an able, resourceful, daring and bold prosecutor, crusading for justice on behalf of helpless and defenseless victims of sexual violence. At one point, for over a year running in her capacity as its lead prosecutor, the Victorville Family Violence Unit logged a 100 percent conviction rate. Despite suggestions that not all of the defendants Ashley was prosecuting were guilty as charged and that she was making her mark as a consequence of the advantage she had in prosecuting cases in which the plight of the alleged victims naturally resonated with most jurors and redounded to the defendants’ detriment, Ashley’s stock in the office was steadily rising.
Given the nature of the cases she was steeped in, it had not been lost upon Ashley that for many men, their libidos can drive much of their action and override their judgment.
Among some of her colleagues, particularly woman, Ashley was perceived as a climber who was not above utilizing her sexuality to ingratiate herself with the men in the district attorney’s office or the legal community to advance professionally. In time, her marriage with Alex Martinez, who would subsequently be appointed to the Superior Court, would falter. Her fraternization with her male colleagues resulted in a degree of embarrassment to those with whom she worked, complicating relations within the office and twisting the focus of its function. One such fling was with another prosecutor, David Mazurek, who was appointed to the San Bernardino County Superior Court by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Their liaison would result in some degree of complication for both the prosecutor’s office and the court system, as cases Ashley was prosecuting on occasion came before him in the Victorville Courthouse. That brewing contretemps was headed off, at least temporarily, in January 2008 when Ashley was transferred from Victorville to Joshua Tree, where she became a supervising prosecutor for the district attorney’s office there. Thirteen months later, however, in February 2009, Mazurek was assigned to the Yucca Valley Courthouse.
Within three months, rumors began to circulate about the relationship between Mazurek and Ashley, with concern growing that it was highly improper for her to be overseeing any elements of the prosecutor’s office’s function in Yucca Valley while her paramour was hearing the cases she and the deputy district attorneys she supervised were prosecuting. Ultimately, then-Assistant Presiding Judge Michael Welch intervened, preventing an already insalubrious circumstance from worsening into a full-blown scandal.
Ashley’s fraternization with her male colleagues flourished in an atmosphere that was a reflection of the culture at the highest level of the office, the tenor of which was set by the district attorney himself, Mike Ramos. Ramos had a celebrated penchant for womanizing, in particular involving the office’s staff members or others involved in San Bernardino County’s legal community. Even prior to his election as district attorney in 2002, Ramos’s liaisons with many different women when he was employed as a deputy prosecutor under then-District Attorney Dennis Stout were known to some of his colleagues. After he assumed the post of district attorney, his activity accelerated along with his elevation in status and became more widely known, as his relationships with three of his own deputy prosecutors, two of his office’s evidence technicians and two of his office’s clerks scandalized the office. In May of 2009, the brewing calumny fully manifested when Ramos was publicly linked with a dozen women to whom he was not married, one of whom included the county’s then-public defender, Doreen Boxer. In at least a few instances, some of the women employed in the district attorney’s office to whom Ramos was linked had attempted and on occasion succeeded in using their relationships with their boss to promote themselves professionally. It was thus perhaps inevitable that Ashley would gravitate into a relationship with Ramos. Significantly, Ashley took the circumstance beyond occasional trysts and capitalized on the matter by distinguishing herself from his other liaisons by cementing their relationship into a more permanent one by becoming his mistress. From there she would bootstrap herself up into the position of the office’s second-in-command, assistant district attorney.
In June 2014, Ramos was reelected to his fourth term as the county’s top prosecutor.
Four months later, disguising his action as an “office reorganization,” Ramos proposed creating a third assistant district attorney’s position. The following month, in November 2014, he presented the official reorganization proposal to the board of supervisors, the members of which unanimously ratified it and funded it. In effectuating the reorganization, he promoted Ashley into the newly created assistant district attorney position, bypassing a multitude of other more experienced and respected prosecutors in the office, most notably John Kochis, who was widely viewed by his colleagues to be the most logical candidate for promotion to an open assistant district attorney’s position, based on his 37 years’ experience as a prosecutor, including a decade overseeing the Rancho Cucamonga office. Nearly two dozen prosecutors in the office, all with résumés
equal to or surpassing Ashley’s – Michael Abney, Bruce Brown, Rob Brown, Terry Brown, Bob Bulloch, Lewis Cope, Michelle Daly, Gary Fagan, Charles Feibush, Joseph Gaetano, Clark Hansen III, Britt Imes, Grover Merritt, Kathy Norman, Maureen O’Connell, Doug Poston, James Secord, Reza Sadeghi, Kevin Smith, Denise Trager-Dvorak, Charles Umeda, Ron Webster, Simon Umschied and Richard Young – were also overlooked.
As assistant district attorney, Ashley was called upon to oversee all criminal operations for the Central, West Valley and juvenile divisions as well as that pertaining to crimes against children, family violence and elder abuse.
Beginning as early as 2007, a report that Laura Whitehurst, a first-year teacher at Redlands High School, was sexually involved with students had reached Redlands High School Principal Christina Rivera, Redlands High School Vice Principal Michael Muñoz and Hilary Craw, a student counselor at the school. That report would be followed by at least two other indicators of inappropriate relations between Whitehurst, the daughter of longtime Redlands Unified School District Teacher Dale Whitehurst, and other male students at the school. When a handful of students spoke openly about what they had witnessed, one going so far as to say that Whitehurst was having sex with students, they were admonished to quit spreading rumors. In late 2007, Rivera and Craw, in response to the persistence of those rumors, questioned Laura Whitehurst and a 16-year-old male student, both of whom denied there was anything going on between them.
Despite those alarm bells, no one at Redlands High School or with the Redlands Unified School District informed law enforcement authorities about Whitehurst under California’s mandated reporter law, which requires that educators, medical professionals, psychologists, clergy, social workers, firefighters, daycare facility employees and childcare workers must report to law enforcement or child protective services within 36 hours any activity or information such a mandated reporter might reasonably suspect relates to the abuse of a child. Unwilling to act on the basis of gossip, Redlands High administrators undertook no internal investigation of Whitehurst and no information with regard to what was known or suspected was provided to law enforcement or child protective services. As either a precaution or as a consequence of a routine rotation, district officials subsequently transferred Whitehurst to a teaching assignment at Citrus Valley High School. In short order, there were reports circulating among students and some teachers there with regard to what was thought to be continued inappropriate contact between Whitehurst and students.
In 2011, as a consequence of a legal action brought against the district, East Valley High School and Redlands Unified administrators were provided information that an East Valley High teacher, Megan Kelly, had been involved with a student beginning in January 2009 and continuing until May 2009, just prior to that student graduating in 2009. The district placed Kelly on paid administrative leave.
In 2012, officials at Redlands High School learned of what were termed “highly inappropriate” interactions between Redlands High math teacher/golf coach Kevin Kirkland and a female student, including suggestive text messages in which Kirkland appeared to be luring her to his home. When confronted by district administrators, Kirkland acknowledged his comportment, saying he recognized that he had used “poor judgment.” He was strongly counseled to discontinue the behavior and a notation of unprofessional conduct was inserted into his personnel file for what was supposed to be ten years.
In the spring of 2013 there had been reports of a relationship between Whitehurst, who was visibly pregnant, and a student. In May 2013, both Whitehurst and the student were questioned about their relationship by a school official and separately denied anything improper between them existed. On June 18, 2013, Whitehurst gave birth to a child out of wedlock. A photo of her in a maternity room in the presence of the previously referenced student, then 17, came into the possession of district officials. Shortly thereafter, the student’s mother contacted district officials and told them Whitehurst’s child was her grandchild. District officials then informed Redlands police. Shortly thereafter, Whitehurst was arrested.
By that point, the school district was under legal siege by the 2009 Redlands High graduate who had alleged being sexually abused by Megan Kelly, who also went by the name Megan Cullen. Collectively, the district and Kelly had denied the allegations after district officials had conducted an investigation that was later paralleled by a Redlands Police Department investigation. No physical evidence to support the charges could be located, as the events in question had taken place some two years before the student came forth to make the accusation. In an effort to quietly dispose of the lawsuit brought by the student, the terms of a settlement were worked out. That settlement involved a $505,000 payment to the student and an agreement that Kelly, who had remained on paid administrative leave since 2011, would continue to draw her pay until she officially left the employ of the district as of June 2014, with the proviso that she would be ineligible to return to work for the district ever thereafter.
Ultimately, Whitehurst, who after an extensive and somewhat belated investigation by the Redlands Police Department was charged with 41 felony counts of unlawful sex acts, pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and two counts of oral copulation with a person under 18, pertaining to relationships she had with three male students while she was teaching at Citrus Valley and Redlands high schools. She was sentenced to a year in prison and required to register as a sex offender. She was released after serving six months of that sentence.
In 2015, district officials again became aware of inappropriate conduct by Kirkland, this time involving his having taken several female students off campus during lunch hour. He was again upbraided by district officials and once again acknowledged having used poor judgment. Another notation of unprofessional conduct was placed into his personnel file, but no report was made to the Redlands Police Department.
In late March 2016, the father of one of Kirkland’s victims bypassed district officials and went with his daughter directly to the Redlands Police Department, reporting to them what Kirkland had engaged in. A criminal investigation was begun and the police department contacted the district. In April 2016, the district placed Kirkland on administrative leave. In relatively short order, the Redlands Police Department established that Kirkland was sexually involved with four students between June 2014 and March 2016. In May 2016, Redlands Police Department investigators sought and obtained an arrest warrant for Kirkland. He was not at his Rancho Cucamonga home. After it was determined he was out of the state, he was located in Gilbert, Arizona, where he was taken into custody. His bail was set at $1.5 million and was reduced less than a week later to $275,000, though he remained in custody.
In August 2016, the Redlands Unified School District agreed to a $6 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by attorneys Morgan Stewart and Vince Finaldi of the Irvine-based law firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi on behalf of the father of Laura Whitehurst’s child against the district.
In April 2017, Kirkland acknowledged molesting four female Redlands High School students from June 2014 through May 2016, entailing guilty pleas on eight felonies and three misdemeanors. Represented by attorney Sean O’Connor, Kirkland was sentenced on June 12, 2017 to two years in prison, whereupon he was granted credit for time served and good behavior and released from custody the same day, having served one day less than 13 months in county custody at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga from May 13, 2016 until June 12. 2017.
On September 14, 2017 attorneys Morgan Stewart and Saul Wolf of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi filed a suit on behalf of a 19-year-old former Redlands High School student, identified as Jane RSL Doe, in which she named Kirkland as a defendant, along with the Redlands Unified School District, Redlands High School, former Redlands High School Principal Christina Rivera and former Redlands School District Superintendent Lori Rhodes. In the suit, Jane RSL Doe claimed she was abused by Kirkland beginning when she was 15. On September 18, 2017 Stewart and Wolf filed a second suit on behalf of four former Redlands High School students, a 25-year-old woman, Jane RWB Doe, who maintained she was abused by Kirkland between the time she was thirteen years old and seventeen years old; a 23-year-old woman, Jane RJH Doe, who maintained she was abused by Kirkland from the time she was sixteen until she was seventeen; an eighteen-year-old woman, Jane RSA Doe, who claimed she was abused by Kirkland between the time she was fifteen and seventeen years old; and an eighteen-year-old woman, Jane RDA Doe, who claimed she was abused by Kirkland when she was fifteen to seventeen years old.
Stewart and Wolf brought suit on behalf of two other former students, alleging one had been victimized by former English teacher Brian Townsley, and the other sexually abused by former theater director Daniel Bachman.
In August 2018, the Redlands Unified School District reached a settlement agreement with regard to the Kirkland, Townsley and Bachman lawsuits, agreeing to a combined payout of $15.7 million.
Last month, on November 8, Joel Koonce was arrested at Ontario High School, where he was working as a substitute teacher, on suspicion of having sexually abused or molested four female students while he was working as a drama teacher at Redlands High School between September 2016 and October 2017. Reportedly, Koonce hid drugs and drug paraphernalia on the school campus and had provided drugs to some of his students; plied some of his charges with pornography; engaged in sex acts with students on campus, in a classroom and in the school’s auditorium, as well as at his home and in his vehicle after driving to a secluded spot in the San Bernardino National Forest; had sexual encounters with one of his students “dozens of times” and another on “at least 40 occasions” and on one occasion with two of the students at once; and videotaped several of his sexual encounters with his students. Some of those videos have been obtained by law enforcement authorities.
An initial investigation into suspicions about Koonce shortly after he was terminated by the district in November 2017 turned up insufficient evidence to allow investigators with the Redlands Police Department to provide a prosecutable case to the district attorney’s office. In the early summer of this year, there was a report that Koonce was yet in contact with at least one of his former students. An inquiry into that report dead-ended. In October, however, one of his victims came forward and investigators were able to obtain sufficient information to prompt further statements from other alleged victims. It was learned that Koonce was again teaching, in this instance at Ontario High, as no report relating to the circumstance under which he left Redlands Unified showed up in the data base kept for credentialed teachers. Officially, Koonce’s departure from Redlands Unified was based on teaching performance issues unrelated to any sexual misconduct.
When Koonce’s arrest was effected on November 8, 2018 it was on the basis of three counts of oral copulation with a person under the age of 18 outlined in the arrest warrant along with three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse, two counts of child molesting, three counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object, two counts of distributing or showing pornography to a minor, one count of sodomy of a person under the age of 18 and one count of sexual exploitation of a child.
He remains jailed.
The law firm of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi took up the cause of the four students exploited by Koonce. Last Friday, December 7, it was announced that the Redlands Unified School District had come to terms with the four young women, agreeing to pay $8.5 million to them to head off any legal claims or lawsuits arising out of their experience.
That latest payout brings to $30.705 million the total settlement amount paid in the last five years to 15 students sexually abused by teachers within the Redlands Unified School District.
Accompanying those settlements are allegations that the pattern of sexual abuse in the Redlands Unified School District over the last decade lies, in some measure, at the feet of Mary Ashley and Mike Ramos.
Ramos is intrinsically linked with the Redlands Unified School District and the Redlands community. A Redlands High School graduate, he was a member of the Redlands Unified School Board in the seven years prior to his 2002 election as district attorney. Moreover, his wife, Gretchen, has long been employed with the district as the executive secretary to the superintendent. Reflexively, Mike Ramos acted at every level and every stage of the scandal that beset the district to protect it as an institution, to protect the district’s personnel and its reputation, as well as to limit the district’s financial exposure and liability. This was evident in the manner in which the district attorney’s office reacted to the Megan Kelly matter. Over the two-year period that elapsed from the time the unnamed 2009 Redlands High School graduate filed suit against Kelly and the district and that case settled, the district attorney’s office took no direct action and did nothing to facilitate the Redlands Police Department’s investigation of the attendant issues. This had the practical effect of not generating anything to contradict the district’s contention that neither it nor Kelly had done anything wrong. The district attorney’s office then participated in and signed off on the settlement of the civil suit brought by the former student against Kelly and the district, allowing the matter to expire quietly and with as little negative publicity for the district as possible.
When the Whitehurst scandal broke, even amidst the nationwide furor it generated, the district attorney’s office soft-pedaled the case. Ultimately, Whitehurst was given a one-year sentence, for which she served six months, after acknowledging, against the backdrop of indications that she had been sexually intimate with a dozen students or more in the five years she was teaching, to having sex with three of her students. Similarly, the district attorney’s office chose not to delve any more deeply into Kirkland’s case then it needed to in order to dispose of the matter, and rushed toward concluding the case not with a trial but with a plea bargain before all of the evidence investigators accumulated had been fully examined and analyzed for its probative value.
The early lead investigator on the case, Detective Kelli Bishop, had accumulated a considerable wealth of material to indicate that Kirkland’s claims that much of what was alleged against him was simply instances of him having engaged in benign familiarities with several of his female students were out-and-out lies. Bishop was also able to establish that Kirkland’s sexually-laced interaction with his students dated back at least eight years prior to the inappropriate texts he had sent in 2012, including sexual contact with students when he was the vice principal at Clement Middle School in Redlands.
Redlands Police investigators using warrants had seized several of Kirkland’s personal effects and possessions. Among those was his cell phone. The Redlands Police detectives forwarded the cell phone to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Scientific and Technical Analysis Division. An analysis of the phone turned up even more damning material, including nude photos of himself and pornographic photos of one of his known victims. Yet before that evidence had been fully assessed and reported upon, Ramos’s office negotiated a guilty plea with Sean O’Connor, Kirkland’s attorney, which netted him a two-year sentence. This resulted in Kirkland’s release after having served 13 months.
In the latter stages of the police department’s investigation of what came to be recognized as a pattern of sexual abuse within Redlands’ high schools, Redlands Police Department detectives undertook to coordinate their efforts with the district attorney’s office in anticipation of the charges those detectives believed were likely to be filed. This extended to an examination of the so-called “code of silence” observed by district officials that was intended to avoid subjecting the known or suspected perpetrators to anything other than covert discipline and prevent the district from experiencing adverse publicity. This was occurring in the context of the district attorney’s office weighing whether certain district higher-ups – including former Superintendent Lori Rhodes. Redlands High School Principal Christina Rivera, Redlands High School Vice Principal Michael Muñoz and Former Citrus Valley Principal/later Assistant Superintendent Bernie Cavanagh – were in criminal violation of the reporting mandates relating to the sexual abuse of minors. Information is that Assistant District Attorney Mary Ashley told the police department’s investigators that they should not interview the parents of the student victims. At least some of the police department investigators saw that as an effort to derail a potential case against the district’s administrators.
For those in the Redlands Police Department working on the various sexual abuse cases involving students at Redlands’ high schools, including detectives Kelli Bishop and Leslie Martinez as well as the senior officer overseeing the investigation, Travis Martinez, some of the prosecutorial decisions by the deputy district attorney handling the case, Jeanetta Ringhofer, were troubling. Questions emerged as to whether Ringhofer was being micromanaged by Assistant District Attorney Ashley. According to the Redlands Police Department, the decision not to use all of the material and evidence accumulated in its investigation in the course of the various prosecutions was contrary to the suggestions contained in the department’s reports submitted to prosecutors, reflecting a call made at the level of the district attorney’s office. In at least some of those cases, according to the officers, given the nature of the material and the evidence, that decision was inexplicable.
From a perspective beyond just that of the law enforcement officers investigating the various cases, there is a possible explanation of that decision.
The Redlands Unified School District is insured by the Schools Association For Excess Risk, a liability-sharing consortium of school districts which will pay legal settlements of up to $25 million per case growing out of findings, verdicts or negotiated concessions of negligence by one of its member school districts. Under the bylaws of the Schools Association For Excess Risk, coverage is provided only in instances of negligence. If a district’s liability arises out of criminal activity on the part of the district or one or more of its employees, the coverage is withdrawn. That may partially explain why the district attorney’s office, led by Ramos, who is so sensitive to issues impacting the Redlands Unified School District with which he is so variously connected and identified, was reluctant and then ultimately unwilling to prosecute any district officials with regard to the sexual abuse of district students by teachers.
Another consideration for Mike Ramos was that his wife, Gretchen, functioned within the district as the executive secretary to the superintendent. Her status and place within the district hierarchy would suggest that she was in the loop when the several decisions with regard to how all of of the perpetrators of student sexual abuse – Kelly, Whitehurst, Kirkland, Townsley, Bachman and Koonce – were made. Whether Gretchen Ramos, like some of the other senior district officials such as the superintendent, principals and assistant principals categorized as educators could be classified as a mandated reporter is a legal question that is subject to debate. Under one interpretation of the law, if she in fact knew about the abuse, she was a mandated reporter. Under a different interpretation, she perhaps was not. Nevertheless, had the district attorney’s office elected to prosecute the district’s and high schools’ administrators for failure to report the abuse they had knowledge or reasonable suspicion of, Gretchen Ramos was likely to have been dragged into the mix.
Earlier this year, when Mike Ramos was queried about his office’s decision not to charge any district officials with failure to report the abuse or having attempted to cover it up, he insisted there had been a “very thorough” analysis of the case by his senior staff, particularly those involved in both prosecuting and overseeing the prosecution of crimes against children, which in effect meant Ashley working with a handful of others. Ramos attributed the decision not to prosecute anyone at the district beyond the teachers who had personally engaged in the abuse to Ashley.
The Sentinel made a direct inquiry of Ashley. She declined to respond as to whether she had come to a conclusion with regard to the breadth and depth of the prosecutions in the Redlands School District sexual abuse scandal independently or whether she acceded to a request by Mike Ramos to defuse the situation short of prosecutions of district officials, in particular ensuring that Ramos’s wife would not be charged criminally.
Ashley did not dispute reports that she gave instruction to the effect that detectives with the Redlands Police Department should not interview the parents of student victims of sexual assault/abuse at the hands of their teachers.
Ashley would not allow herself to be drawn into a discussion of whether instructing the detectives to not interview parents of the victims might or might not be considered an effort to interfere with the investigation that amounted to obstruction of justice. Ashley refused to state whether she was acting at the behest of Mike Ramos when she told the police investigators to not interview the parents of the Redlands School District sexual abuse/assault victims. Nor was Ashley willing to discuss whether her personal relationship with Mike Ramos swayed her action and her decision with regard to the cases. She likewise was unwilling to publicly reflect on whether her feelings toward Mike Ramos and loyalty to him overwhelmed her and created a circumstance whereby her previously demonstrated dedication to the principle of protecting the defenseless against abuse and sexual exploitation which had earlier characterized her work as a prosecutor was allowed to lapse.
Mike Ramos was defeated in his bid for reelection as district attorney in June and is scheduled to leave office the first week of 2019. Reliable sources have told the Sentinel that District Attorney-elect Jason Anderson intends to remove Ashley from her position as assistant district attorney immediately upon assuming his elected post and would not be amenable to continuing to employ her as a prosecutor in the office in any capacity.
More than a decade ago, Mary Ashley made a name for herself as a hard-charging deputy prosecutor devoted to obtaining convictions against those engaged in the sexual exploitation of children. Four years ago, her reputation in that regard was used as the ostensible grounds for promoting her to the second highest ranking position in the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, that of assistant district attorney. Now, with the ever-deepening scandal over the sexual abuse and molestation of students by teachers in the Redlands Unified School District intensifying, Ashley is on the brink of being fired as details emerge about her efforts to prevent detectives with the Redlands Police Department from advancing with their investigation into reports relating to crimes that have to date resulted in the district paying settlements of $30.7 million to the victims.
Pointedly, Ashley’s motive in the cover-up appears to have roots in an equally lurid sex scandal in which she, the district attorney and the district attorney’s wife are entangled.
Like a good number of young attorneys, Ashley sought and obtained work as a prosecutor to beef up her résumé shortly after she passed the bar. In her case, she was hired by San Bernardino County’s then-district attorney, Dennis Stout in 1998. Initially, she was given the routine, menial assignments given to virtually all newcomers in the office, the less-than glamorous role of filing low- and middle-grade misdemeanor cases, evaluating police reports to determine whether enough evidence existed for the office to proceed with what most prosecutors and much of the public consider to be trifling matters. A year later she was given a reprieve from the drear of that station when she was allowed to move on to felony work. Initially she was entrusted mainly with theft cases, primarily involving auto theft, matters about which she feigned some enthusiasm, but for which she felt no real passion. With the new millennium, however, she was given a handful of child molest and child abuse assignments. It was within this province of the law that Ashley seemed to have found her calling.
In 2002, Mike Ramos, a deputy prosecutor under Dennis Stout who had been employed by Stout and then-Assistant District Attorney Dan Lough to prosecute, among other things, political corruption and malfeasance in office cases against Hispanic elected and appointed government officials, challenged Stout and beat him in that year’s election.
Ramos continued to employ Ashley, who was then working out of the Victorville prosecutor’s office, in the same capacity she had acceded to under Stout. In 2004, with the formulation of the Victorville Family Violence Unit, a pilot program intended to test the efficacy of concentrating investigative and prosecutorial resources with regard to a specified subset of generally related cases including the physical abuse of minors, women and seniors, fraud targeting the elderly and sexual exploitation and abuse, Ashley was designated as its lead prosecutor. In little more than six years as an attorney, her career was advancing nicely.
Along the way, Ashley had developed a relationship with another up-and-coming member of the district attorney’s office, Alex Martinez. In time, they married.
To be certain, there are aspects of the prosecution of sex-related crimes and in particular crimes relating to the sexual-predation of children that carry with them significant and complicated application-of-justice implications. The mere leveling of such accusations – accurate or not – have a profoundly and often irreversible negative impact upon the accused. The nature of the charges will render virtually all elements of the public biased against the defendant, making mounting a defense – even a legitimate one – extremely difficult. Moreover, the sordid facts, minutiae and evidence presented in the making of such cases are extremely abhorrent. Even if the veracity of the charges can be successfully brought into question or refuted, the association with the allegations can destroy a defendant’s reputation forever.
Faced with that reality, most defendants will plead guilty short of trial, particularly if the prosecution offers a sentencing recommendation, which in the overwhelming number of cases are ratified by the court, that is substantially less than the decade-or-more sentences that the conviction on such crimes often result in. Indeed, even an innocent defendant under the duress of facing such charges and at the advice of competent legal counsel, will enter a guilty plea.
Questions attended Ashley’s comportment within this milieu. While her skill as a trial lawyer was not her strong suit, the sheer ferocity with which she handled each case and the air of moral rectitude which she convincingly assumed conveyed that there was no question that those she was prosecuting were absolutely guilty of the most despicable acts imaginable. The indigent she prosecuted whose defense was handled by the county’s poorly funded and inadequately staffed public defenders were helpless before her onslaught. In the cases where she was up against a better financially-fixed defendant, by her display of moral outrage over the circumstances of the alleged crimes she succeeded again and again at convincing the judges before whom the matters were being tried to foreclose whatever legal gambits of escape that were being utilized by those defendants to elude what she insisted was those defendants’ just retribution.
In one precedent setting instance, Ashley succeeded in expanding the ability of prosecutors to push a case of sexual assault toward ultimate conviction. Of significance, in that particular case the victim was connected to a crucial element of the legal defense network in San Bernardino County that might have otherwise been opposed to the expansion of the prosecutorial reach of the law she employed.
Robert Lee Cadogan, who was then 43, stealthily gained entry, early in the morning of Christmas Eve 2004, into the home of a deputy public defender. Once inside he crept into one of the home’s bedrooms where the homeowner’s 20-year-old niece, visiting for the holidays, was sleeping. He forcibly raped her, threatening to kill her if she awoke anyone. Afterward, Cadogan was quickly apprehended. In February 2005, his defense attorney stymied the legal proceedings against him with a claim of his client’s mental incompetence, which was confirmed the following month when the court received a psychologist’s finding that Cadogan was not competent to stand trial. In May 2005, Ashley made a motion with the court that a so-called “conditional examination” of Cadogan’s wife, Paris Cadogan, take place on the grounds that she was terminally ill with cancer and likely would not survive until trial. Cadogan’s attorney opposed the motion, arguing the criminal proceedings had been suspended and the conditional examination should not go forward. The court ordered the conditional examination to proceed, and that examination of Mrs. Cadogan took place on May 16, 2005. Under questioning, Paris Cadogan provided testimony deemed probative of her husband’s guilt, including her description of him fleeing from her home when the police arrived to question him, together with sexual characteristics of Robert Lee Cadogan matching testimony by the victim. She stated that her husband had vitiligo, a skin condition which resulted in white patches on his hands and genitals, which matched the victim’s description. The following month, June 2005, Paris Cadogan died. The hearing into Cadogan’s competence to stand trial continued from that point forward and the court thereafter granted Ashley’s motion to compel Cadogan to submit to a psychological examination, overcoming his refusal to submit to follow-up mental condition testing after the March 2005 finding of incompetence. A competency trial for Cadogan was initiated in April 2006, ending with a jury’s conclusion in May 2006 that he was indeed competent to stand trial, and the court reinstated criminal proceedings against him. In July 2007, a second jury was impaneled and the defendant’s trial on his alleged crimes began. Cadogan’s attorney sought to have the case dismissed based on the court having allowed the conditional examination despite the case having been suspended. The court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss and permitted the prosecution to play the videotape of Paris Cadogan’s conditional examination for the jury. The jury subsequently convicted Cadogan of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, attempted sodomy by use of force and first degree residential burglary. Cadogan was sentenced to 37-years-to-life in prison. His attorney, Marsha Clark, appealed the conviction to the Fourth District California Court of Appeal, Division 3, contending the court erred by admitting at trial evidence obtained at a conditional examination of his late wife because Cadogan’s competency was in question at the time of the conditional examination. The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction, with its only modification that it substituted a one-year consecutive term rather than a four-year consecutive term for his attempted sodomy conviction, reducing Cadogan’s total prison term commitment from 37-years-to-life to 34-years-to-life.
The upshot of the ruling on appeal was that in the future prosecutors would be at liberty to utilize conditional examinations in obtaining convictions. Ashley was lionized as an able, resourceful, daring and bold prosecutor, crusading for justice on behalf of helpless and defenseless victims of sexual violence. At one point, for over a year running in her capacity as its lead prosecutor, the Victorville Family Violence Unit logged a 100 percent conviction rate. Despite suggestions that not all of the defendants Ashley was prosecuting were guilty as charged and that she was making her mark as a consequence of the advantage she had in prosecuting cases in which the plight of the alleged victims naturally resonated with most jurors and redounded to the defendants’ detriment, Ashley’s stock in the office was steadily rising.
Given the nature of the cases she was steeped in, it had not been lost upon Ashley that for many men, their libidos can drive much of their action and override their judgment.
Among some of her colleagues, particularly woman, Ashley was perceived as a climber who was not above utilizing her sexuality to ingratiate herself with the men in the district attorney’s office or the legal community to advance professionally. In time, her marriage with Alex Martinez, who would subsequently be appointed to the Superior Court, would falter. Her fraternization with her male colleagues resulted in a degree of embarrassment to those with whom she worked, complicating relations within the office and twisting the focus of its function. One such fling was with another prosecutor, David Mazurek, who was appointed to the San Bernardino County Superior Court by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Their liaison would result in some degree of complication for both the prosecutor’s office and the court system, as cases Ashley was prosecuting on occasion came before him in the Victorville Courthouse. That brewing contretemps was headed off, at least temporarily, in January 2008 when Ashley was transferred from Victorville to Joshua Tree, where she became a supervising prosecutor for the district attorney’s office there. Thirteen months later, however, in February 2009, Mazurek was assigned to the Yucca Valley Courthouse.
Within three months, rumors began to circulate about the relationship between Mazurek and Ashley, with concern growing that it was highly improper for her to be overseeing any elements of the prosecutor’s office’s function in Yucca Valley while her paramour was hearing the cases she and the deputy district attorneys she supervised were prosecuting. Ultimately, then-Assistant Presiding Judge Michael Welch intervened, preventing an already insalubrious circumstance from worsening into a full-blown scandal.
Ashley’s fraternization with her male colleagues flourished in an atmosphere that was a reflection of the culture at the highest level of the office, the tenor of which was set by the district attorney himself, Mike Ramos. Ramos had a celebrated penchant for womanizing, in particular involving the office’s staff members or others involved in San Bernardino County’s legal community. Even prior to his election as district attorney in 2002, Ramos’s liaisons with many different women when he was employed as a deputy prosecutor under then-District Attorney Dennis Stout were known to some of his colleagues. After he assumed the post of district attorney, his activity accelerated along with his elevation in status and became more widely known, as his relationships with three of his own deputy prosecutors, two of his office’s evidence technicians and two of his office’s clerks scandalized the office. In May of 2009, the brewing calumny fully manifested when Ramos was publicly linked with a dozen women to whom he was not married, one of whom included the county’s then-public defender, Doreen Boxer. In at least a few instances, some of the women employed in the district attorney’s office to whom Ramos was linked had attempted and on occasion succeeded in using their relationships with their boss to promote themselves professionally. It was thus perhaps inevitable that Ashley would gravitate into a relationship with Ramos. Significantly, Ashley took the circumstance beyond occasional trysts and capitalized on the matter by distinguishing herself from his other liaisons by cementing their relationship into a more permanent one by becoming his mistress. From there she would bootstrap herself up into the position of the office’s second-in-command, assistant district attorney.
In June 2014, Ramos was reelected to his fourth term as the county’s top prosecutor.
Four months later, disguising his action as an “office reorganization,” Ramos proposed creating a third assistant district attorney’s position. The following month, in November 2014, he presented the official reorganization proposal to the board of supervisors, the members of which unanimously ratified it and funded it. In effectuating the reorganization, he promoted Ashley into the newly created assistant district attorney position, bypassing a multitude of other more experienced and respected prosecutors in the office, most notably John Kochis, who was widely viewed by his colleagues to be the most logical candidate for promotion to an open assistant district attorney’s position, based on his 37 years’ experience as a prosecutor, including a decade overseeing the Rancho Cucamonga office. Nearly two dozen prosecutors in the office, all with résumés
equal to or surpassing Ashley’s – Michael Abney, Bruce Brown, Rob Brown, Terry Brown, Bob Bulloch, Lewis Cope, Michelle Daly, Gary Fagan, Charles Feibush, Joseph Gaetano, Clark Hansen III, Britt Imes, Grover Merritt, Kathy Norman, Maureen O’Connell, Doug Poston, James Secord, Reza Sadeghi, Kevin Smith, Denise Trager-Dvorak, Charles Umeda, Ron Webster, Simon Umschied and Richard Young – were also overlooked.
As assistant district attorney, Ashley was called upon to oversee all criminal operations for the Central, West Valley and juvenile divisions as well as that pertaining to crimes against children, family violence and elder abuse.
Beginning as early as 2007, a report that Laura Whitehurst, a first-year teacher at Redlands High School, was sexually involved with students had reached Redlands High School Principal Christina Rivera, Redlands High School Vice Principal Michael Muñoz and Hilary Craw, a student counselor at the school. That report would be followed by at least two other indicators of inappropriate relations between Whitehurst, the daughter of longtime Redlands Unified School District Teacher Dale Whitehurst, and other male students at the school. When a handful of students spoke openly about what they had witnessed, one going so far as to say that Whitehurst was having sex with students, they were admonished to quit spreading rumors. In late 2007, Rivera and Craw, in response to the persistence of those rumors, questioned Laura Whitehurst and a 16-year-old male student, both of whom denied there was anything going on between them.
Despite those alarm bells, no one at Redlands High School or with the Redlands Unified School District informed law enforcement authorities about Whitehurst under California’s mandated reporter law, which requires that educators, medical professionals, psychologists, clergy, social workers, firefighters, daycare facility employees and childcare workers must report to law enforcement or child protective services within 36 hours any activity or information such a mandated reporter might reasonably suspect relates to the abuse of a child. Unwilling to act on the basis of gossip, Redlands High administrators undertook no internal investigation of Whitehurst and no information with regard to what was known or suspected was provided to law enforcement or child protective services. As either a precaution or as a consequence of a routine rotation, district officials subsequently transferred Whitehurst to a teaching assignment at Citrus Valley High School. In short order, there were reports circulating among students and some teachers there with regard to what was thought to be continued inappropriate contact between Whitehurst and students.
In 2011, as a consequence of a legal action brought against the district, East Valley High School and Redlands Unified administrators were provided information that an East Valley High teacher, Megan Kelly, had been involved with a student beginning in January 2009 and continuing until May 2009, just prior to that student graduating in 2009. The district placed Kelly on paid administrative leave.
In 2012, officials at Redlands High School learned of what were termed “highly inappropriate” interactions between Redlands High math teacher/golf coach Kevin Kirkland and a female student, including suggestive text messages in which Kirkland appeared to be luring her to his home. When confronted by district administrators, Kirkland acknowledged his comportment, saying he recognized that he had used “poor judgment.” He was strongly counseled to discontinue the behavior and a notation of unprofessional conduct was inserted into his personnel file for what was supposed to be ten years.
In the spring of 2013 there had been reports of a relationship between Whitehurst, who was visibly pregnant, and a student. In May 2013, both Whitehurst and the student were questioned about their relationship by a school official and separately denied anything improper between them existed. On June 18, 2013, Whitehurst gave birth to a child out of wedlock. A photo of her in a maternity room in the presence of the previously referenced student, then 17, came into the possession of district officials. Shortly thereafter, the student’s mother contacted district officials and told them Whitehurst’s child was her grandchild. District officials then informed Redlands police. Shortly thereafter, Whitehurst was arrested.
By that point, the school district was under legal siege by the 2009 Redlands High graduate who had alleged being sexually abused by Megan Kelly, who also went by the name Megan Cullen. Collectively, the district and Kelly had denied the allegations after district officials had conducted an investigation that was later paralleled by a Redlands Police Department investigation. No physical evidence to support the charges could be located, as the events in question had taken place some two years before the student came forth to make the accusation. In an effort to quietly dispose of the lawsuit brought by the student, the terms of a settlement were worked out. That settlement involved a $505,000 payment to the student and an agreement that Kelly, who had remained on paid administrative leave since 2011, would continue to draw her pay until she officially left the employ of the district as of June 2014, with the proviso that she would be ineligible to return to work for the district ever thereafter.
Ultimately, Whitehurst, who after an extensive and somewhat belated investigation by the Redlands Police Department was charged with 41 felony counts of unlawful sex acts, pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and two counts of oral copulation with a person under 18, pertaining to relationships she had with three male students while she was teaching at Citrus Valley and Redlands high schools. She was sentenced to a year in prison and required to register as a sex offender. She was released after serving six months of that sentence.
In 2015, district officials again became aware of inappropriate conduct by Kirkland, this time involving his having taken several female students off campus during lunch hour. He was again upbraided by district officials and once again acknowledged having used poor judgment. Another notation of unprofessional conduct was placed into his personnel file, but no report was made to the Redlands Police Department.
In late March 2016, the father of one of Kirkland’s victims bypassed district officials and went with his daughter directly to the Redlands Police Department, reporting to them what Kirkland had engaged in. A criminal investigation was begun and the police department contacted the district. In April 2016, the district placed Kirkland on administrative leave. In relatively short order, the Redlands Police Department established that Kirkland was sexually involved with four students between June 2014 and March 2016. In May 2016, Redlands Police Department investigators sought and obtained an arrest warrant for Kirkland. He was not at his Rancho Cucamonga home. After it was determined he was out of the state, he was located in Gilbert, Arizona, where he was taken into custody. His bail was set at $1.5 million and was reduced less than a week later to $275,000, though he remained in custody.
In August 2016, the Redlands Unified School District agreed to a $6 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by attorneys Morgan Stewart and Vince Finaldi of the Irvine-based law firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi on behalf of the father of Laura Whitehurst’s child against the district.
In April 2017, Kirkland acknowledged molesting four female Redlands High School students from June 2014 through May 2016, entailing guilty pleas on eight felonies and three misdemeanors. Represented by attorney Sean O’Connor, Kirkland was sentenced on June 12, 2017 to two years in prison, whereupon he was granted credit for time served and good behavior and released from custody the same day, having served one day less than 13 months in county custody at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga from May 13, 2016 until June 12. 2017.
On September 14, 2017 attorneys Morgan Stewart and Saul Wolf of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi filed a suit on behalf of a 19-year-old former Redlands High School student, identified as Jane RSL Doe, in which she named Kirkland as a defendant, along with the Redlands Unified School District, Redlands High School, former Redlands High School Principal Christina Rivera and former Redlands School District Superintendent Lori Rhodes. In the suit, Jane RSL Doe claimed she was abused by Kirkland beginning when she was 15. On September 18, 2017 Stewart and Wolf filed a second suit on behalf of four former Redlands High School students, a 25-year-old woman, Jane RWB Doe, who maintained she was abused by Kirkland between the time she was thirteen years old and seventeen years old; a 23-year-old woman, Jane RJH Doe, who maintained she was abused by Kirkland from the time she was sixteen until she was seventeen; an eighteen-year-old woman, Jane RSA Doe, who claimed she was abused by Kirkland between the time she was fifteen and seventeen years old; and an eighteen-year-old woman, Jane RDA Doe, who claimed she was abused by Kirkland when she was fifteen to seventeen years old.
Stewart and Wolf brought suit on behalf of two other former students, alleging one had been victimized by former English teacher Brian Townsley, and the other sexually abused by former theater director Daniel Bachman.
In August 2018, the Redlands Unified School District reached a settlement agreement with regard to the Kirkland, Townsley and Bachman lawsuits, agreeing to a combined payout of $15.7 million.
Last month, on November 8, Joel Koonce was arrested at Ontario High School, where he was working as a substitute teacher, on suspicion of having sexually abused or molested four female students while he was working as a drama teacher at Redlands High School between September 2016 and October 2017. Reportedly, Koonce hid drugs and drug paraphernalia on the school campus and had provided drugs to some of his students; plied some of his charges with pornography; engaged in sex acts with students on campus, in a classroom and in the school’s auditorium, as well as at his home and in his vehicle after driving to a secluded spot in the San Bernardino National Forest; had sexual encounters with one of his students “dozens of times” and another on “at least 40 occasions” and on one occasion with two of the students at once; and videotaped several of his sexual encounters with his students. Some of those videos have been obtained by law enforcement authorities.
An initial investigation into suspicions about Koonce shortly after he was terminated by the district in November 2017 turned up insufficient evidence to allow investigators with the Redlands Police Department to provide a prosecutable case to the district attorney’s office. In the early summer of this year, there was a report that Koonce was yet in contact with at least one of his former students. An inquiry into that report dead-ended. In October, however, one of his victims came forward and investigators were able to obtain sufficient information to prompt further statements from other alleged victims. It was learned that Koonce was again teaching, in this instance at Ontario High, as no report relating to the circumstance under which he left Redlands Unified showed up in the data base kept for credentialed teachers. Officially, Koonce’s departure from Redlands Unified was based on teaching performance issues unrelated to any sexual misconduct.
When Koonce’s arrest was effected on November 8, 2018 it was on the basis of three counts of oral copulation with a person under the age of 18 outlined in the arrest warrant along with three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse, two counts of child molesting, three counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object, two counts of distributing or showing pornography to a minor, one count of sodomy of a person under the age of 18 and one count of sexual exploitation of a child.
He remains jailed.
The law firm of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi took up the cause of the four students exploited by Koonce. Last Friday, December 7, it was announced that the Redlands Unified School District had come to terms with the four young women, agreeing to pay $8.5 million to them to head off any legal claims or lawsuits arising out of their experience.
That latest payout brings to $30.705 million the total settlement amount paid in the last five years to 15 students sexually abused by teachers within the Redlands Unified School District.
Accompanying those settlements are allegations that the pattern of sexual abuse in the Redlands Unified School District over the last decade lies, in some measure, at the feet of Mary Ashley and Mike Ramos.
Ramos is intrinsically linked with the Redlands Unified School District and the Redlands community. A Redlands High School graduate, he was a member of the Redlands Unified School Board in the seven years prior to his 2002 election as district attorney. Moreover, his wife, Gretchen, has long been employed with the district as the executive secretary to the superintendent. Reflexively, Mike Ramos acted at every level and every stage of the scandal that beset the district to protect it as an institution, to protect the district’s personnel and its reputation, as well as to limit the district’s financial exposure and liability. This was evident in the manner in which the district attorney’s office reacted to the Megan Kelly matter. Over the two-year period that elapsed from the time the unnamed 2009 Redlands High School graduate filed suit against Kelly and the district and that case settled, the district attorney’s office took no direct action and did nothing to facilitate the Redlands Police Department’s investigation of the attendant issues. This had the practical effect of not generating anything to contradict the district’s contention that neither it nor Kelly had done anything wrong. The district attorney’s office then participated in and signed off on the settlement of the civil suit brought by the former student against Kelly and the district, allowing the matter to expire quietly and with as little negative publicity for the district as possible.
When the Whitehurst scandal broke, even amidst the nationwide furor it generated, the district attorney’s office soft-pedaled the case. Ultimately, Whitehurst was given a one-year sentence, for which she served six months, after acknowledging, against the backdrop of indications that she had been sexually intimate with a dozen students or more in the five years she was teaching, to having sex with three of her students. Similarly, the district attorney’s office chose not to delve any more deeply into Kirkland’s case then it needed to in order to dispose of the matter, and rushed toward concluding the case not with a trial but with a plea bargain before all of the evidence investigators accumulated had been fully examined and analyzed for its probative value.
The early lead investigator on the case, Detective Kelli Bishop, had accumulated a considerable wealth of material to indicate that Kirkland’s claims that much of what was alleged against him was simply instances of him having engaged in benign familiarities with several of his female students were out-and-out lies. Bishop was also able to establish that Kirkland’s sexually-laced interaction with his students dated back at least eight years prior to the inappropriate texts he had sent in 2012, including sexual contact with students when he was the vice principal at Clement Middle School in Redlands.
Redlands Police investigators using warrants had seized several of Kirkland’s personal effects and possessions. Among those was his cell phone. The Redlands Police detectives forwarded the cell phone to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Scientific and Technical Analysis Division. An analysis of the phone turned up even more damning material, including nude photos of himself and pornographic photos of one of his known victims. Yet before that evidence had been fully assessed and reported upon, Ramos’s office negotiated a guilty plea with Sean O’Connor, Kirkland’s attorney, which netted him a two-year sentence. This resulted in Kirkland’s release after having served 13 months.
In the latter stages of the police department’s investigation of what came to be recognized as a pattern of sexual abuse within Redlands’ high schools, Redlands Police Department detectives undertook to coordinate their efforts with the district attorney’s office in anticipation of the charges those detectives believed were likely to be filed. This extended to an examination of the so-called “code of silence” observed by district officials that was intended to avoid subjecting the known or suspected perpetrators to anything other than covert discipline and prevent the district from experiencing adverse publicity. This was occurring in the context of the district attorney’s office weighing whether certain district higher-ups – including former Superintendent Lori Rhodes. Redlands High School Principal Christina Rivera, Redlands High School Vice Principal Michael Muñoz and Former Citrus Valley Principal/later Assistant Superintendent Bernie Cavanagh – were in criminal violation of the reporting mandates relating to the sexual abuse of minors. Information is that Assistant District Attorney Mary Ashley told the police department’s investigators that they should not interview the parents of the student victims. At least some of the police department investigators saw that as an effort to derail a potential case against the district’s administrators.
For those in the Redlands Police Department working on the various sexual abuse cases involving students at Redlands’ high schools, including detectives Kelli Bishop and Leslie Martinez as well as the senior officer overseeing the investigation, Travis Martinez, some of the prosecutorial decisions by the deputy district attorney handling the case, Jeanetta Ringhofer, were troubling. Questions emerged as to whether Ringhofer was being micromanaged by Assistant District Attorney Ashley. According to the Redlands Police Department, the decision not to use all of the material and evidence accumulated in its investigation in the course of the various prosecutions was contrary to the suggestions contained in the department’s reports submitted to prosecutors, reflecting a call made at the level of the district attorney’s office. In at least some of those cases, according to the officers, given the nature of the material and the evidence, that decision was inexplicable.
From a perspective beyond just that of the law enforcement officers investigating the various cases, there is a possible explanation of that decision.
The Redlands Unified School District is insured by the Schools Association For Excess Risk, a liability-sharing consortium of school districts which will pay legal settlements of up to $25 million per case growing out of findings, verdicts or negotiated concessions of negligence by one of its member school districts. Under the bylaws of the Schools Association For Excess Risk, coverage is provided only in instances of negligence. If a district’s liability arises out of criminal activity on the part of the district or one or more of its employees, the coverage is withdrawn. That may partially explain why the district attorney’s office, led by Ramos, who is so sensitive to issues impacting the Redlands Unified School District with which he is so variously connected and identified, was reluctant and then ultimately unwilling to prosecute any district officials with regard to the sexual abuse of district students by teachers.
Another consideration for Mike Ramos was that his wife, Gretchen, functioned within the district as the executive secretary to the superintendent. Her status and place within the district hierarchy would suggest that she was in the loop when the several decisions with regard to how all of of the perpetrators of student sexual abuse – Kelly, Whitehurst, Kirkland, Townsley, Bachman and Koonce – were made. Whether Gretchen Ramos, like some of the other senior district officials such as the superintendent, principals and assistant principals categorized as educators could be classified as a mandated reporter is a legal question that is subject to debate. Under one interpretation of the law, if she in fact knew about the abuse, she was a mandated reporter. Under a different interpretation, she perhaps was not. Nevertheless, had the district attorney’s office elected to prosecute the district’s and high schools’ administrators for failure to report the abuse they had knowledge or reasonable suspicion of, Gretchen Ramos was likely to have been dragged into the mix.
Earlier this year, when Mike Ramos was queried about his office’s decision not to charge any district officials with failure to report the abuse or having attempted to cover it up, he insisted there had been a “very thorough” analysis of the case by his senior staff, particularly those involved in both prosecuting and overseeing the prosecution of crimes against children, which in effect meant Ashley working with a handful of others. Ramos attributed the decision not to prosecute anyone at the district beyond the teachers who had personally engaged in the abuse to Ashley.
The Sentinel made a direct inquiry of Ashley. She declined to respond as to whether she had come to a conclusion with regard to the breadth and depth of the prosecutions in the Redlands School District sexual abuse scandal independently or whether she acceded to a request by Mike Ramos to defuse the situation short of prosecutions of district officials, in particular ensuring that Ramos’s wife would not be charged criminally.
Ashley did not dispute reports that she gave instruction to the effect that detectives with the Redlands Police Department should not interview the parents of student victims of sexual assault/abuse at the hands of their teachers.
Ashley would not allow herself to be drawn into a discussion of whether instructing the detectives to not interview parents of the victims might or might not be considered an effort to interfere with the investigation that amounted to obstruction of justice. Ashley refused to state whether she was acting at the behest of Mike Ramos when she told the police investigators to not interview the parents of the Redlands School District sexual abuse/assault victims. Nor was Ashley willing to discuss whether her personal relationship with Mike Ramos swayed her action and her decision with regard to the cases. She likewise was unwilling to publicly reflect on whether her feelings toward Mike Ramos and loyalty to him overwhelmed her and created a circumstance whereby her previously demonstrated dedication to the principle of protecting the defenseless against abuse and sexual exploitation which had earlier characterized her work as a prosecutor was allowed to lapse.
Mike Ramos was defeated in his bid for reelection as district attorney in June and is scheduled to leave office the first week of 2019. Reliable sources have told the Sentinel that District Attorney-elect Jason Anderson intends to remove Ashley from her position as assistant district attorney immediately upon assuming his elected post and would not be amenable to continuing to employ her as a prosecutor in the office in any capacity.